Bataan Avenue in West Berkeley Was Named for a World War II Tragedy

In honor of Veteran’s Day, my Berkeley Patch history blog this week takes us to a short one-block street in West Berkeley named in memory of a tragic World War II event. Bataan Avenue is the only street in Berkeley named for any World War II event.

During World War II the population of the Bay Area increased dramatically. The Kaiser shipyards in Richmond, for example, employed thousands and claimed to produce a "ship-a-day". Existing housing was inadequate to absorb this new population, and both public agencies and private builders constructed thousands of new housing units. The housing shortage was so acute that families of larger homes would often create second units as part of the war effort.

In Berkeley vacant land was quickly subdivided by developers who built small affordable homes and rental units. Scattered throughout west and central Berkeley are hundreds of such units, many of them single-story duplexes or clusters of two-story apartment houses of the same design.

One distinctive development was the subdivision of a block bordered by Cedar & Jones, 7th & 8th streets. Between Cedar and Jones, a new street was cut through and it was called Bataan Avenue. On this square block 12 nearly identical houses were built in 1942. The houses were designed and built by a contractor named James L. Rich. The building permits state the construction costs were between 3,000 and 3,500 dollars. The houses have two or three bedrooms and one bath.

Bataan Avenue was named for the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines where a tragic early World War II episode occurred. According to the website of the Bataan-Corregidor Memorial Foundation of New Mexico, Inc. the 200th Coast Artillery Anti-aircraft units from New Mexico arrived in the Philippines at Clark Field and Ft. Stotsenberg in September of 1941. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, much of the Pacific Fleet was incapacitated and could not defend the Pacific Rim. On Dec. 8, 1941 an aerial attack was launched on the Philippines which destroyed most of the American Air Force planes which were caught on the ground. After the Japanese landed and began to advance, the troops retreated to the Bataan Peninsula.

The men held out for four months, but finally Bataan was surrendered on April 9,1942, and Corregidor on May 6, 1942. Many of the 1800 troops became prisoners of war under severe conditions and only 900 returned. Because the Coast Artillery troops were from New Mexico, the City of Albuquerque will dedicate a new memorial at Bataan Memorial Park on Sunday, April 7, 2002.

Bataan Avenue was named shortly after the United States forces surrendered to the Japanese on April 9, 1942. 

Susan Cerny is author of An Architectural Guidebook to San Francisco and the Bay Area and Berkeley Landmarks. This article first appeared in the Berkeley Daily Planet in April of 2002.